privacy

HexView has an article about tracking vehicles with RFID tire pressure monitors. The devices are found in tires and transmit tire pressure to the engine control module, which sounds innocuous enough, but to prevent modules from reading neighboring cars’ tires by accident, they also transmit a unique ID. Thus, you can follow a car around […]

A company named Phorm (formerly 121Media) has introduced a new product for ISPs. The idea is that the ISP installs this product (basically a transparent proxy) on their network, and as their customers surf the web, the OIX proxy replaces advertisements on web pages with advertisements on the Phorm network. To make it more palatable, […]

Peter Scharr, Germany’s Commissioner of Data Protection and head of the European Union’s privacy working group, has stated that information identified only by IP address must be considered personally identifiable information. As the AP article points out, this could have rather serious implications for search engines and many other electronic businesses, and RSnake is concerned […]

CA’s Security Advisor Research Blog has an interesting post about a bit of malware they discovered when doing research for their Anti-Spyware product — the My SHC Community system. You’re offered a chance to join when you buy something from sears.com or kmart.com. The system offers you “special offers and promotions,” the usual marketing stuff […]

During this year’s Christmas shopping season, I made some large in-person transactions at the same time as my wife made an online transaction, and my credit card was suspended by the issuing bank for potential fraudulent activity. This happens relatively often, whenever someone’s spending patterns are flagged by the neural-network based automated fraud detection used […]